I’m so fed up with hosting company hosthi I can’t tell! I’ve only four five sites with them – but once a week I have to contact them to tell that they should set correct permission for this and that! The only good thing they have is their help line chat system.

Some of the people from technical support there don’t seem to be able to write correct english (and it’s an American company!)… for example:

me:

please correct permission for db some_databasename

Hosthi:

At the we are working on server so kindly set for some time it will be fine

Usually it’s always the same kind of issue – someone or some script sets wrong permission for site root or database file, so either you get a 403 error when opening your site or an error when trying to access your pages which query a mysql database… For 2 years now nothing changed – it even got worse: their quality of service is far too low – so Beware! They just get you with their low price!

(some days later)

I had to contact them again today! There’s a gallery2 system on the site which may produce too much load on the server as they say! I do not know if it’s really the gallery2 or some spiders which harvest pictures… what they do is: automatically set permission of gallery/main.php to 000! or set permission of databasefile to NOREAD! That’s their quality of service!

I checked my log files and finally found out, that some east-asian bots were harvesting the site for images: baidu and sogou. So I had to edited the .htaccess file to effectively restrict them to enter my site…

Addendum:

Another website got infected by a Gumblar virus like javascript injection. They just closed http and ftp! I could not even clean the files myself! And again they aren’t aware of that:

Hosthi:

Your site found to be a attacking one.

me:

As I told you: it was the Gumblar virus which infected the site

Hosthi:

You need to remove this page

me:

I CANNOT do it myself because Hosthi has removed permisson on /public_html! No ftp no nothing!

And the restoration of a simple backup can take days, DAYS!…

From there homepage: Choose HostHi and you will never regret it, your web site could not be in safer hands.

Unless there’s no Akismet module for gallery2 one occasionally has to delete spam manually from the comment table of the gallery system (ref.: Gallery2: deleting comment spam) – if your table and field prefix is g2_ and g_ you can use the code below:

CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE tmptable
SELECT g_id
FROM `g2_Comment` gc
WHERE
g_subject like '%url%' or
g_subject like '%http%' or
g_subject like '%personals%' or
g_subject like '%poker%' or
g_subject like '%blackjack%' or
g_subject like '%gambling%' or
g_subject like '%viagra%' or
g_subject like '%phentermine%' or
g_subject like '%casino%' or
g_subject like '100%' or
g_subject like '%slots%' or
g_subject like '%Cialis%' or
g_subject like '%url%' or
g_comment like '%http%' or
g_comment like '%personals%' or
g_comment like '%poker%' or
g_comment like '%blackjack%' or
g_comment like '%gambling%' or
g_comment like '%viagra%' or
g_comment like '%phentermine%' or
g_comment like '%casino%' or
g_comment like '100%' or
g_comment like '%slots%' or
g_comment like '%Cialis%';
DELETE g2_Entity FROM g2_Entity
INNER JOIN tmptable ON g2_Entity.g_id = tmptable.g_id;
DELETE g2_ChildEntity FROM g2_ChildEntity
INNER JOIN tmptable ON g2_ChildEntity.g_id = tmptable.g_id;
DELETE g2_Comment FROM g2_Comment
INNER JOIN tmptable ON g2_Comment.g_id = tmptable.g_id;DROP TEMPORARY TABLE tmptable;